


I wish I didn't get your name tattooed on my heart

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: Bad Parenting, Emotional Baggage, Episode Tag: s03e02 The Great Escape, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Loss of Parent(s), Minor Chase Stein/Gertrude Yorkes, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27498199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: So what if Gert was still mad at him and wanted to punch that hopeful smile off his face with every fibre of her being? So what if him being in the Hostel and trying to act as if nothing had happened between them was rubbing her the wrong way? So what if he was the enemy and had left them, his friends, his team, his family, to join their parents who were hellbent on kidnapping them and trying to end the world?She had never actually heard Chase cry, not since they were little and attending Amy’s funeral, and she was a little terrified of what it could mean. Chase's mother was dead, and that has to count for something, right?
Relationships: Chase Stein/Gertrude Yorkes
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	I wish I didn't get your name tattooed on my heart

**Author's Note:**

> So, I have never watched Runaways, but I've been watching some clips on youtube, and it looks great! I've heard about it for a long time but have never actually seen it until like, last week. But I have a lot of things to say? I may be incorrect because I don't know much, but from what I do know, Chase left the group to go home because his father had a brain tumour and was dying? The fact that the others thought he was betraying them to join the cause Pride believed in is a little crazy to me, unless I'm wrong. And also?? During 3x02, Chase's mother literally DIED and not a single person gave a fuck?? I mean??? Holy hell? Anyway. I couldn't sleep last night so I wrote this instead, and all the mentions of betrayal and things are from their perspective, not mine because I think it's kinda fucked up how they treat him like the enemy when his father was littery dying. If there are any terrible canon discrepancies, please let me know!!

Apparently, the drive home was tense and silent, and in the backseat of the black van, Chase stared out the window and didn’t say a word. That was prefered, in many ways. He just gazed out at the passing streets, curled up against the door, not participating in any hushed conversation and not being addressed in the slightest, like he was a ghost- as if he wasn’t even there.

Once they turned their backs on him, even _Molly_ shrugging at his plight, they had immediately departed to their rooms, almost as if they couldn’t wait to get away from him, leaving him standing alone in the entryway of the Hostel, looking lost and a little afraid and so sad that it was almost palpable.

Gert stood at the top of the stairs, holding onto the balustrade and hidden partially behind the wall, as Chase slowly wandered away with his head down and his hands in his pockets. He came back with his hammock, dusty and unused, and dragged it across the ground to the garage. It made a harsh scraping sound on the concrete that echoed around the Hosel.

It was a struggle to get to sleep that night. A wave of furious anger pumped through her veins like blood, making her fingers tingle and her jaw clench. But there was also a hopeful feeling blooming like a flower in her chest, bright and happy and surprisingly optimistic. Part of her wanted to go down there and punch that attractive smile off his face. The other part wanted to knock on his door and kiss that smile away instead, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling the breath from his lungs. Instead, she laid in bed, fuming and confused and resolutely unforgiving. 

She had fallen asleep eventually, thinking about Chase but also not thinking about him at the same time, but she was suddenly woken by Old Lace nuzzling at the side of her neck and huffing hot breath onto her skin. “What?” she grumbled as Old Lace tried to nudge her out of bed, pressing against her side and making a deep rumbling noise in her chest. “You want to go for a walk? What’s wrong?”

Eventually, Gert understood the message and heaved herself reluctantly out of the bed, running a heavy hand down her face and trying to untangle the knots in her hair. Old Lace waited impatiently by the door, shuffling and keening, and Gert resigned herself for staying up for a long while yet.

Admittedly, Gert had expected Old Lace to lead her towards their decaying and sparsely populated kitchen, or the exit that pointed towards the woods that surrounded the Hostel, but instead, she turned towards the garage, where Gert knew that Chase had claimed as his room for the single night he was allowed to stay. Old Lace’s footsteps were surprisingly light despite her heavy gait, and Gert followed with a slowly rising wave of panic as they came to a stop outside of the shut garage door.

She was about to hiss at Old Lace for bringing her here once she started clawing at the concrete at the base of the door, but between the lull of her heartbeat in her ears and the pained sounds Old Lace was making, she heard it. Faint, but there. Sniffling almost, stuttered hiccuping gasps and a high-pitched, half-aborted whine that she felt digging into her very soul. Old Lace felt it too, and she covered her snout with her taloned hands. 

Gert was keenly aware that she should turn around and walk away right now, leave him to the pain that he _deserved_ to feel and pretend like this never happened. But there was still that very raw part of her that would always care about him, would always want to be there for him when times got rough, just like he was always there for her. Well. Almost always there.

But then again, she had never actually heard Chase cry, not since they were little and attending Amy’s funeral, and she was a little terrified of what it could mean.

She lifted her hand to knock on the door but froze before she went through with it. Old Lace was still making soft growling noises in the back of her throat that only Gert could hear, and through their bond, she could feel the dinosaurs worry and agitation. She wished that someone were here with her to tell her what to do. Not that she needed their permission, but their advice would be helpful.

Deep now, she knew she shouldn’t care. She shouldn’t give a fuck about this asshole alone in a dark room in a place he used to call his home before he betrayed his family, the coward who had the audacity to come back to them and try and act as if nothing changed. But this was Chase. The stupid dumbass who was also somehow the most brilliant and smart person Gert had ever met. He was kind to her sister and made her _quinceañera_ the best day of her life. He was more than willing to drop anything and everything to help his friends, and even when they were on opposite sides of the same war, he still tried his best to help them, to be kind to them, even when they wanted to kill him where he stood and erase all their memories of him.

Besides. Maybe it was too harsh to kill him a coward or a traitor. It’s not like he joined because he agreed with their cause. His dad was sick. He was dying. Gert didn’t want to give him any wiggle room, but she did understand why he left.

Thankfully, or maybe not, she didn’t get the chance to decide, as Old Lace made a too-loud sound that almost echoed in the silence of the Hostel, and the gut-wrenching sobbing stopped abruptly, swiftly with skill and experience, and the door was flung open.

Quite frankly, Chase looked terrible, and Gert was able to admit that. His eyes were glassy and red from crying. A flush had risen high on his wet cheeks, his skin clammy from sweat. His hair was mused as if he had been running an anxious hand through it. His jaw was set into a firm line, angry almost, with his shoulders back and his entire body was taught like a wound wire. Gert had never seen him look like that, and she couldn’t help but wonder where or why he had learnt to put up such a front. 

It was almost like he didn’t recognise her in the darkness, and he blinked hard to rid himself of the tears. Old Lace pressed her wet nose against his palm and licked at his fingers salty with tears, and he startled. When he realized who it was, he smiled so tenderly that Gert felt her heart beat a little harder, and he pet Old Lace exactly where he knew she liked it. “Hey girl,” he said, and his voice was thick and rough and raw and _wrong_. Gert sent a half-hearted glare her dinosaur. _Traitor_ , she thought fondly. He glanced back up at her, even in the dark, even with his eyes bleary with tears, he still met her gaze like it was just any other day. “Hi. What are you doing here? Did you need something? Are you OK?”

She couldn’t believe that she had just caught him crying at three in the morning, and _he_ was asking _her_ if she was OK. It was so thoughtful, so kind of him, just like it used to be. But it wasn’t like that anymore, despite how much she wished it were. Instinctually she put up her walls and answered his open expression with a scowl. “I could ask you the same question.”

His face fell, and he looked at her with such sadness that she almost took it back. “Hey,” he said, sounding like he was mere seconds away from crying again. “You’re the one standing outside my door in the middle of the night like a creep.”

“Oh, I’m a creep now, am I?” Gert forced herself to cross her arms over her chest.

“Kind of, yeah,” Chase retorted, sounding confused and angry and hurt, like a kicked puppy on the side of the road.

She had a feeling that she was going to make this worse before she made this better, but perhaps that was for the best. “Right,” she said, making her voice as hard and sharp as she could muster. “At least I’m not the one crying at three in the morning because he can’t cope with dealing with the consequences of his mistakes.”

The look on his face made her think that she couldn’t have hurt him more if she had punched him in the gut. “Whatever,” he said in a tone that made her think that it mattered more to him than he ever wanted to admit. He left the room and pushed past her, gently moving her out of the way with his shoulder. “I can’t deal with this right now, and I shouldn’t have to take it from you.”

Chase’s footsteps receded further into the Hostel, and she didn’t even bother worrying about it. Maybe Alex or Nico would yell at her about that, but while she didn’t totally trust Chase, she knew better than anyone what he could be like and knew that he was harmless to them.

He had left the door open, and Old Lace had made her way inside, resting her chin on Chase’s hammock, strung up suffocatingly between the cramped space of the Rolls and his work desk that hadn’t been touched since he left, collecting dust. 

The first and only thing that caught her eye was the new items on the desk. There were lots of sketches, of new inventions and outrageous ideas and future plans, but on the very top of the pile were two crisp, detailed drawings on tear-stained paper. One was of a woman suspended within a tube, her eyes closed, her body still, her face emotionless, her clothes nondescript. The other was of a park bench on a hill in the middle of nowhere, the sky a collage of specifically shaped scribbles which Gert was almost positive was the Aurora Borealis. There were two figures on the bench- a boy with his head down and his face burrowed in a woman’s shoulder, while the woman cupped his cheek and gently carded her fingers through his hair. The people had no facial features, no emotions, no familiar characteristics, but Chase was such a good artist and his work was so familiar to her that she could easily tell who the two people seated on the bench were.

“Shit,” she muttered into the empty room, looking at the sketch of Janet in the Healing Algorithm tube, face slack and empty. “ _Shit_.”

They had all been so wrapped up with the rapid progression of getting Karolina back and breaking into the building and seeing Chase again, that nobody stopped to consider that his mum just died, that she sacrificed herself so Chase and Karolina could escape. Chase mum was dead, and Gert had caught him crying about it late at night so nobody could see him, and she had thrown his pain back in his face.

She was just the _worst_.

Old Lace was curled up on the floor beneath Chase’s hammock, watching her through lidded eyes. Gert pocketed the two pristine sketches and shuffled around the others on the desk, so it looked like she had taken a glance at all of them. When Gert began to leave the room, she rose to her feet and followed her out of the cramped room the stunk of sweat and tears, she gingerly placed the drawings beside her bed, and she returned to her now-restless night sleep.

The next morning, Chase’s door was shut again, but a surprisingly hearty breakfast had been prepared, with eggs and bacon and waffles and sweet oatmeal laden with fresh fruit. It truly was a sight to behold. Chase never left the garage, and nobody mentioned where the food came from. 

While Molly was busy playing with Old Lace, Gert joined Karolina and Nico on the counter, prepared with the sketches from Chase’s room. “Listen,” she said as she slid between them. “I know that this is probably the last thing you want to talk about right now, but I kind of spoke to Chase last night,”

“Gert, please,” Nico sighed. “I know we all want him back, but we can’t just forgive him like what he did means nothing. Otherwise, he’s never going to learn.”

There were so many things that Gert wanted to say in response to that, but she decided to hold her tongue. “He was crying,” she blurted out. “Like, really crying. He looked like he’d been crying for ages. And then I went in and I found these-” she spread the sketches out on the counter before them. “-and realized that, like, his mum just _died_? That she sacrificed herself to save him, and we didn’t even give him a chance to say goodbye to her, and he doesn’t even have any of us to talk to about it.”

There was a pause as Nico took the sketch of Janet in the tube, and Karolina tenderly touched a tearstain on the drawing of the Northern Lights. “What were you doing in Chase’s room?” she asked.

“Old Lace,” Gurt said like that explained everything. “I know we’re mad at him and that we don’t know if we can trust him yet, and I know you might think I’m bias and all, but I _think_ that he just lost both his parents in one day? I don’t know what happened to Victor, but Janet is… she’s dead. She died for him. And we wouldn’t even let him say goodbye, and then…”

She trailed off. Alex’s words now carried an extra bite, an extra layer of unnecessary pain. Nico sighed through her nose, her expression curdling like old milk. “When Alex made that comment about losing parents, I hadn’t thought much of it. But I never bothered…” she looked at Karolina. “Did you know about Janet?”

Reluctantly, Karolina nodded, but she didn’t take her eyes away from the sketch in her hands. “It was a trap. He wanted you to choose. I’m not sure what he expected. I think that he knew you would save me, but I think he wanted to see who you would choose between Chase and his mum. I don’t know. I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

“What are we going to do?” Gert asked. “Because I totally agree, he can’t be forgiven so easily, but his mum just died. And I mean, I’m not trying to excuse what he did, but his dad had a tumour and he was dying. Chase felt like he owed him, a stupid sense of duty or something. It’s not so dissimilar from what Karolina did, though the situations and circumstances were still so different. I just… I don’t know. I feel terrible, and we’re always supposed to be there for each other, right? I hate that we can’t even console him. If it were any of us, it would be different. But I’m still just so _mad_ that I don’t know what to do. I can’t even think about talking to him without wanting to puke.”

The silence of the Hostel was suddenly interrupted by the roaring of the Rolls and the thrumming of its engine, sounding healthier than it had in a very long time now that Chase had returned and dedicated time to giving it a much-needed tune-up. Everyone turned to the garage as the familiar sound sparked a warm and loving memory before they all hastily turned away as if it never happened.

“I don’t know, Gert,” Nico turned away from the door, her jaw set. “But we’ll figure it out. We always do, right? I think we all just need time. He needs to earn our forgiveness, and I think we need to learn how to forgive him too or learn to understand why he did what he did. But we’ll sort it out.”

Gert was resolutely silent as the conversation came to a close, and Nico and Karolina left her there, alone at the counter with the sound of the Rolls drumming in her ears and the sketches clutched to her chest, and she contemplated whether to carry them with her as something to remember him by or to return them to Chase before he left them again, this time by force. She didn’t know hat she wanted to do. And she hated it.

When did everything get so fucked up?

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, I understand why the team were so mad at Chase, but I honestly don't think that the extent of their hatred is justified, so just know that every time I mentioned 'all the horrible parts of Chase and the terrible things he did', I don't believe in any of it and that it's been written from the perspective of the character.


End file.
